T6s 








4 — I 



EVOLUTION of TECHNICAL EDUCATION 

IN 

ECONOMICS, POLITICS, STATECRAFT AND MORALS ; THE WORK 

OF THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE DURING 

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS. 



BY 

ROBERT H. THURSTON, 

Honorary Member of the Institute and Director of Sibley College, 
Cornell University. 



Commemorative Meeting held in Convention Hall, National Export Expo- 
sition, Saturday, October 7th, 1899, on the Occasion of the Celebra- 
tion of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Franklin Institute. 



Reprinted from the Journal of the Franklin Institute, 
February, 1900 



PHILADELPHIA: 



1900. 



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Reprinted from the Journal of the Franklin Institute, February, 1900. 



EVOLUTION of TECHNICAL EDUCATION 

IN 

ECONOMICS, POLITICS, STATECRAFT AND MORALS ; THE WORK 

OF THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE DURING 

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS. 



By Robert H. Thurston, 
Honorary Member of the Institute and Director of Sibley College, Cornell 

University. 



[Commemorative Meeting held in Convention Hall, National Export Exposi- 
tion, Saturday, October 7th, on the Occasion of the Celebration of the Sev- 
enty-fifth Anniversary of the Franklin Institute.] 



The ideal education of the old Greek who would teach 
the youth of his country " to speak the truth and to ride a 
horse," although by no means as comprehensive as the 
" complete and perfect education " of John Milton, is at 
least typical of the best thought of the educator of our own 
time ; and especially is it representative, in a way, of the 
ideals of the advocate of the evolution of the technical 

t-K- 



education of people with a view to the preparation of the 
great body of " plain people " for " the sequel of their 
lives." The seeking of truths, of facts and data, and of 
methods of utilization of such truths in the interest of the 
people, in the promotion of their moral, social and intellec- 
tual advancement — of that material progress which under- 
lies all — constitutes real education. 

This constitutes a problem for the economist, for the 
wise political leader and for the statesman of every grade. 
For the ancient aristocrat and gentleman, honesty and abil- 
ity to bear oneself as became a gentleman, in all out-of- 
door exercise as well as in social intercourse with other 
gentlefolk, were recognized as the fundamental elements 
of a proper training. Little more was then needed and little 
more was prescribed. As time went on, not simply the 
speaking of truth but the learning of truths, not simply the 
riding of a horse but all manly exercises and warlike ac- 
complishments, were demanded as essential elements of 
the curriculum of the gentlemen. Later, as the arts of war 
became less exercised and as those of peace became more and 
more vitally important with all classes, the clergy of Europe 
came to dictate the form and extent of the education of the 
gentlemen and of the well-to-do classes of the time. Even 
gymnastic exercises as a part of the regular education fell 
into the background with the drifting out of sight of the 
arts of war, and the modern, monastic, gymnastic methods 
of education ' took shape and controlled all schools. Still 
later, after political power had fallen out of the hands of 
monarchs and nobles into the hands of the people, and it 
had come to be seen that the contemporary education was 
suited only to the wealthy and aristocratic classes, a new 
education came into existence, and Bacon and Descartes, 
Milton and the Marquis of Worcester and Vaucanson 
sought the development of this field by the introduction of 
systems of training of the people in such manner as would 
give them not only a knowledge of language and of litera- 
ture, of history and of philosophy, but also an acquaintance 
with the sciences, pure and applied, and with the scientific 
bases, and even the actual processes, of those arts the prac- 



tice of which must, with the great masses, occupy the entire 
adult and active existence. 

In early historic and in prehistoric times, government, 
so far as developed, was simply a system of forcible control 
of the masses of the people with a view to the advantage 
of the ruler and for the purpose of securing for him means 
of offence and defence in his constant warfare with his 
neighbors. As time passed and regal power was taken 
from the hands of the monarch and fell into those of the 
aristocratic classes,- the art of war was cherished largely 
for the same reasons as those controlling the emperors and 
the kings of earlier days ; although the arts of peace as- 
sumed larger importance as wealth and fashion, and the 
always resultant luxury and effeminacy of the wealthy 
classes, brought into being a demand for greater intricacy 
of life and increasing diversification of industries ; while 
the training of skilled workmen has constantly assumed 
greater and greater importance to the state. The science 
of economics, the true science of politics and the real and 
highest duty of statecraft, thus gradually Came to be clearly 
recognized by a few great minds. Comenius and Froebel, 
Milton and Worcester, Descartes and Vaucanson all saw 
clearly the real meaning of the Greek ideal for later times, 
and all did what they could to introduce a broader and a 
better curriculum and to adapt the scheme of general edu- 
cation more perfectly to the needs of the people. To day, 
every thoughtful and well-read and experienced educator 
sees that a true rendering of the Greek ideal into contem- 
porary form would dictate the education of the people for 
the life and work of the people, the universal adoption of 
manual training in public schools, the evolution of a tech- 
nical side to education, which, coupled with the older gym- 
nastic forms, should give to every ambitious youth oppor- 
tunity to learn the scientific, the logical and formal, basis 
of the art into which he feels himself impelled by natural 
predilection, and sees it should include in its range, not 
only all the literatures and their languages, all the sciences 
and their applications, and all the arts of simple accom- 
plishment, but, even more completely and thoroughly, the 



arts and vocations of common life, to the extent to which 
they lend themselves to scientific and logical methods of 
instruction. Only thus can a truly wise system of educa- 
tion of the people for the life and work of the people be 
founded. 

To-day, the arts of war engage the attention of compar- 
atively few ; the arts of peace occupy practically the whole 
mass of the people. The chief duty of the statesman, of 
the wise leader in politics, as well as of the economist, is 
no longer primarily, almost solely, the study of war and of 
strategy, of diplomacy and of the raising of armies ; it is 
now, rather, primarily and principally the promotion of the 
business interests of his country, the advancement of the 
arts of peace, the maintenance of those industries provid- 
ing the essentials of modern civilizations, the diversification 
of industries for the purpose of giving larger opportunities 
and greater industrial and political independence to his 
own people, and the provision of that education, necessarily 
largely technical, which best meets the needs of the people 
as individuals and as a nation. 

To-day, the acuteness of the political leader and the 
wisdom of the statesman may be very accurately gauged 
by the attention which he gives to the education of the 
people and especially to a systematic development of that 
technical education which has so long, but so slowly, been 
in process of evolution as a complement of the gymnastic, 
purely literary curriculum of older times. The moral and 
intellectual magnitude of the educator may be measured 
by the extent to which he has come to appreciate and to 
promote these evolutionary movements. The statesmen of 
Germany, of France, the educators of our own country, 
particularly, illustrate this fact. Glancing over the com- 
pilation of testimony favorable to the inauguration, in the 
earliest days of our republic, of a national university, as 
representative of a national and public scheme of education 
of the people, as printed by the national committee, one 
sees at a glance that the signatures are those of the greatest 
statesmen of their time ; the grander his statecraft, the 
nobler his plans for educational development and the larger 



the measure of the man in all ways. This has been true 
from the days of Zenophon and of Herodotus to those of 
Washington and of Jefferson, and of the founders of Ger- 
man technical education, of our "Land Grant Colleges" 
and of that Cornellian system which would unite in one 
great institution systems of education of all men in all 
studies ; such as would prepare the scholar, equally well 
and with absolutely equal honor, for the rostrum, for the 
pulpit and for the professor's chair, the lawyer for his 
courts, the physician for his hospital and for ministration 
at the sick-bed, the engineer for construction of railroads, 
canals, bridges and steam-engines and steam-boats, the 
farmer for all forms of agriculture and the artisan for the 
workshop, factory and mill. Of these classes, a thousand 
require scientific instruction where one depends upon litera- 
ture for his support ; hundreds demand a knowledge of the 
scientific basis of the arts where one needs tuition in lan- 
guage ; scores seek professions having a scientific founda- 
tion where one can utilize, in later life and for his own 
personal advantage, the " liberal " education of the so called 
" learned professions." 

Biblical history- tells us that, in the eighth generation of 
the race of Adam, Tubal-Cain was " the forger of every cut- 
ting instrument of brass and of iron."* The metal-work- 
ing trades were thus established, necessarily, at the very 
beginning of civilization, and apprenticeship, which is 
technical education, must have become an established sys- 
tem before a vocation could become a trade, before the art 
of the individual could become the art of a guild. Life in 
cities could not take form until the trades of the manufactur- 
ing industries were fully organized and the age of the cities 
of antiquity, of ancient India, of Assyria, of Babylonia, of 
Asia Minor, of Egypt, Greece and Italy, measures approxi- 
mately the space of time separating us from the beginnings 
of manual training and of trade-instruction which are, in 
turn, the foundations of modern technical and professional 
training. When the great deluge washed away the pro- 



*Gen. IV, 22. 



6 

duct of the antediluvian industries, the erection of the 
tower of Babel was the construction, also, of a memorial to 
the brickmakers of the reviving world. Every modern 
fundamental profession, trade and vocation probably has a 
history approximating in its length that of the race itself. 
Technical education is prehistoric in source, and its history 
has simply been that of an originally simple and non-scien- 
tific, an empirical, system, developing by an evolution, under 
conditions sometimes favorable, sometimes restrictive, in 
such manner as to make its progress extremely variable in 
rate and method from its earliest to its latest phases. 

George Ebers, the famous Egyptologist, and hardly less 
distinguished and certainly more widely known historical 
novelist,* finds records amid the tombs and pyramids of the 
valley of the Nile indicating the existence of a great school 
and college system supported by the Pharaohs, fifteen hun- 
dred years and more earlier than the Christian era. For 
the time, indeed, it was more nearly a true university sys- 
tem than has been seen in Europe since that era, and hardly 
less universal in its breadth than that inaugurated by Ezra 
Cornell in the United States of North America in our 
own generation. Organized in the ''House of Seti," in 
Upper Thebes, it excelled the still older foundations at He- 
liopolis and at Memphis in its universality, and especially in 
its extension of its curricula into the fields of technical 
learning. In its preparatory school, even, were departments 
of theological, mathematical, legal, astronomical and peda- 
gogical technology. Its great library contained many thou- 
sand rolls of papyrus. Schools of art, architecture, sculp- 
ture, painting and of engineering, so far as developed at the 
time, insured the cultivation of the aesthetic with the use 
ful and their union in construction. In magnitude, only 
Thotmes' great temple exceeded that vast pile. More than 
this, it was a system of free schools and colleges to which 
every citizen had a right to send his sons. Dormitories for 
the young men of the wealthier and noble classes were ad- 
jacent, and famous priests guarded and guided the pupils. 



* Professor of Egyptology at the University of L,eipsic. 



"Scribes" — university professors, free from other labors — 
were given opportunity for study and research in the highest 
realms of science, of literature and of art, pure and applied. 
Its faculty numbered above 800, and there were three 
" prophets " appointed as directors of its colleges, of whom 
the high-priest was the senior. Splendid residences were 
assigned the faculty, and of these that of the high-priest was 
of unequalled magnificence. . 

Its successor, the "House of Rameses," was similarly but 
even more liberally planned, 1300 B.C. The University of 
Rameses was in existence 1,000 years before the foundation 
of the later and possibly even greater University of Alex- 
andria. 

Technical education finds its earliest, at all complete, rec- 
ords, in the accounts by the Greek historians of the work 
performed by the technical staff of the great University of 
Alexandria, during the centuries elapsing between the foun- 
dation of that first most complete of universities and its de- 
struction by the Saracens.* When Hero taught mechanical 
engineering and Archimedes the art of war,when Hipparchus 
lectured on astronomy and measured the periods of planets 
and eclipse-cycles, and when disciples of Aristotle gave form 
to a logical method, technical education took on a distinct 
form and became recognized as an essential department of 
instruction. The Alexandrian university was not only the 
first such great educational organization, but it was, in a 
true sense, the first university and, for the first time — in fact, 
for the only time in the early history of education — an insti- 
tution properly so designated, since then and there, only, in 
all the course of history, up to our own time, was the en- 
deavor made to offer instruction in all the literatures, in all 
sciences and in all the arts of the time. Ptolemy, in its 
foundation, sought to provide what Ezra Cornell aspired to 
organize — " an institution in which any person might find 
instruction in any study." Aristotle and his disciples de- 
spised no fact and respected all forms of knowledge. 



••"Intellectual Development of Europe," by John W. Draper. New 
York : D. Appleton & Co. 



The " Museum " of Alexandria was the birthplace, as 
Draper has truly said, of all modern science. Other nations 
had earlier studied natural science ; other civilizations had 
still earlier produced great schools and great men curious 
in the observation and study of natural law and of nature's 
marvellous operations ; but it was in Alexandria and in the 
time of the Ptolemies that we find the earliest adoption of 
a correct method of scientific investigation and evidences 
of researches to discover fact and natural law — real scien- 
tific research, " the interrogation of nature through syste- 
matically planned and prosecuted experiment." 

This first and most universal of universities — the times 
being considered — was founded to promote the acquisition 
of knowledge in all fields of history, philosophy, literature 
and natural science, to illustrate the methods of Aristotle, 
the first philosopher recognizing what we are, in our con- 
ceit, prone to designate the " modern " scientific method — 
first seeking facts, next deducing laws, then constructing a 
science by the codification of the natural laws thus revealed. 
The older Greek " philosophy " of the imagination was 
rejected, and the true philosophy of fact and sound logic 
and scientific deduction was brought into practice. The 
speculative philosopher was retired and the experimental 
philosopher, the scientific investigator, took place in the 
van. Archimedes investigated the laws of hydraulics ; 
Ptolemy those of optics ; Hipparchus gave his contempo- 
raries and his successors, even to our own time, valuable 
results of research in astronomy ; using instruments of pre- 
cision and making exact measurements as bases for his 
computations. Euclid created geometry and the world still 
finds his work perfect. Archimedes' mathematical studies 
gave him pre-eminence as a leader in his department, and 
no rival appeared for many centuries, and even up to the 
time of Newton. In applied sciences, in his discoveries 
relating to specific gravity, in his inventions of the lever, 
the screw, the burning mirror, apparatus of war and of 
peace, he proved himself the first really great producer of 
the mechanisms and machinery of the engineer and the 
physicist. Eratosthenes was the great geographer whose 



9 

work was the beginning of all that we to-day know, both 
as to fact and as to system ; he founded physical geog- 
raphy. These mighty men of mind recognized the facts 
of the rotation of the earth, the nature of heat as a form 
of energy, the general distribution of light and heat, and 
the variations of climate throughout a spherical earth. 
So accurate were their astronomical measurements that 
Ptolemy was able to discover the moon's evection, and 
Hipparchus the precession of the equinoxes, measuring its 
period. The motions of the planets were observed and dis- 
cussed, and Timocharis noted the phases and movements 
of Venus. Ctesibus invented fire-engines and water clocks ; 
Hero described the first steam-engine, that form which is 
to-day coming in again, two thousand years after Hero, in 
the form of the steam-turbine, as a rival of the complicated 
and costly and imposing machine which is the product of 
an evolution having a history, as a train of mechanism, of 
just one century. Sosigenes of Alexandria, in the time of 
Julius Caesar, went to Rome to rectify the then confused 
calendar, and thus this first great university, the prototype 
of the modern university of our own State, a university 
without intermediate representative in all these centuries, 
and which we now recognize as in fact a real and a great 
technical college, carried its wonderful work through the 
centuries immediately preceding and succeeding the Chris- 
tian era. 

The Saracen conquest of Egypt resulted in the destruc- 
tion, in large degree, of this majestic edifice of learning; 
but the Saracens themselves, once the conquest was com- 
plete and they were permitted to settle down to the pursuit 
of the arts of peace, became inspired with the genius of 
investigation ; the conquerors took up the work of the con- 
quered and we now credit the Arabian philosophers and 
men of learning with preserving and advancing human 
knowledge in hardly less degree than did, in the earlier 
centuries, the Greek Ptolemies and their allies. 

The energy of a race is like that of a river, small or great, 
quiet or torrential, flowing from earlier to later times, com- 
pelled by natural forces constantly to follow a general di- 



10 

rection determined by the topography of surrounding con- 
ditions, to be sure, but always forced to move on until its 
stock of energy is exhausted. If war demands the expen- 
diture of this energy, it becomes destructive as a mountain 
torrent in time of freshet or cloud-burst ; if peace super- 
venes, still this energy must find application, and in Egypt, 
after the close of the Alexandrian campaign, it fructified 
that intellectual domain as the Nile fertilized the valley 
which it traversed. Similarly, after the Greek and Roman 
civilization had been overwhelmed by the Goths and Van- 
dals from the north and by the Saracens in the valley of the 
Nile, the Arabians diverted their talents into new and use- 
ful channels, and the flow of the stream of Saracen energies 
became subdued to the fructification of the whole of north- 
ern Africa and of Spain, and the development of pure and 
applied sciences among the Ptolemaic peoples was paralleled 
by that later observed among their conquerors. Destructive 
energy was replaced by constructive in all departments of 
human activity. Bagdad became a great cosmopolis in 
which, far more than in the metropolis of to-day, learning 
and scholarship and Aristotelian research were encouraged 
and honored. Haroun-al-Raschid instituted a school in 
ever)'' mosque in the whole Saracen empire, and his succes- 
sor, Al-Mamum (A.D. 813-832), like the first Ptolemy, built 
up a great center of learning at Bagdad, collecting great 
libraries, calling to his court and to his colleges the men 
of the age, from all countries. His was the Augustan 
age of the Saracen empire.* 

The Saracens boasted that they had produced more 
poets than all other nations combined ; that they developed 
further than ever had been done before the scientific 
method now universal ; that they substituted a study of 
nature, of phenomena and fact for speculation ; that they 
promoted mathematics and the exact sciences in a pre- 
viously unexampled manner; that, in their time, alchemists 
founded the science and the art of chemistry; that their 
learned men produced works on mechanics, solid and fluid, 

* Draper. 



1 1 

optics and astronomy, geometry and trigonometry, in- 
vented algebra and adopted the Indian numeration and 
figures. They invented all sorts of distilling, filtering, 
heating and fusing apparatus, instruments of precision for 
the astronomer, the chemist's balance and the simpler 
mechanical combinations. They even constructed tables of 
astronomical quantities, of specific gravities and other scien- 
tific reference compilations. The library at Cairo grew to 
enormous dimensions and is said to have included not less 
than 6,500 works on astronomy alone. This was a circulat 
ing library as well as of reference. The Spanish library of 
the khalifs is said to have numbered 600,000 volumes, its 
catalogue filling forty-four volumes. It is said that a phy- 
sician was compelled to refuse the invitation of a sultan, to 
Bokhara, because the transportation of his library would 
have required 400 camels. Another physician, Honian, at 
Bagdad, maintained a regular business of translations from 
other languages and issued versions of Plato, of Aristotle 
and of other ancient learned authors. All then known fields' 
of knowledge and of research were cultivated, an immense 
literature was developed and all this without let or hind- 
rance, without the slightest censorship on the part of the 
monarch. All sorts of books of reference were produced, 
including an " Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences " by 
Mohammed Abu Abdallah, and colleges dotted the whole 
extent of the empire. Colleges were then, as now, founded 
by wealthy men and provided with a permanent income by 
endowment.- One such college, at Bagdad, with an income 
of 15,000 dinars, taught 6,000 students of every class, rich 
and poor, noble and plebeian alike. Free scholarships were 
provided for the needy and ample salaries for the faculty. 
Of these learned teachers and investigators Al-Mamum 
asserted : " They are the elect of God, his best and most 
useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improve- 
ment of their rational faculties ; the teachers of wisdom 
who are the. true luminaries and legislators of this world, 
which, without their aid, would again sink into ignorance 
and barbarism." 



* Gibbon. 



12 

Professional schools were organized ; that at Cairo set- 
ting the example of stringent entrance-requirements for all 
who would study medicine, long before the foundation of 
the European school at Salerno in Italy. In all directions, 
in the philosophies, in the sciences, in the arts, in all indus- 
tries, this fund of stored energy of the Saracen race found 
useful expenditure. The resulting civilization was far 
more lofty and admirable than was that of Europe during 
those and for many succeeding centuries. In fact, it was 
only in the fifteenth century that sufficient liberty was 
enjoyed by European men of science to permit them to 
enter freely upon that now familiar field of intellectual 
occupation, and it was only at the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, in Europe, that any really notable progress 
began. Since then the acceleration of the movement has 
been like that of a falling stone. 

Technical learning and the technical and professional 
schools of the Saracens came into Europe mainly by way of 
Spain, and the Moslem conquerors of that country made 
famous their centuries of rule by promoting the arts and 
sciences in all practical ways. By the tenth century, that 
country had become a center of learning from which 
streamed, throughout the continent, the rays of scientific 
research and the accumulated learning of all the then exist- 
ing departments of science. The practical outcome was 
seen in well-built, paved and lighted cities, in heating, 
ventilating and elaborate furnishing, on a scale and in a 
manner that even our own time may admire and in some 
respects imitate. Especially admirable were their systems 
of social life, with freedom from the elsewhere universal 
dissipation of the time, with " feasts of reason and flow of 
soul " in place of banquets of savage character and flow of 
bowl. Learned men of all countries were ever-welcome 
guests and Andalusia became the resort of scholars and 
philosophers, and of men noted for their progress in scien- 
tific research, from all countries and all nations and of 
every race. All were equally welcome and all alike honored.. 
When, in the fifteenth century, the Moors were driven out 
of the peninsula, the Castilians found a great civilization 



13 

well established and the foundations of true learning- well 
laid. The efforts of the anti-scientific parties of the time 
were never again able to entirely quench this great light ; 
it grew steadily and pervaded not only all of Europe, but all 
the known world through its stimulation of research, its 
promotion of inventions and its application of all sciences 
and all arts in their thus improved state to the development 
-of the best interests of the common people. In this vivifica- 
tion of the germs of our modern civilization, the Jews were 
particularly active and effective, and this was one of the 
most powerful influences leading to their later banishment. 
Their expulsion from Spain led to the distribution of the 
new civilization throughout the whole of continental Eu- 
rope, wherever a Jew was admitted. 

The Greeks thus carried the torch of scientific learnine 
from their earliest days, its germ antecedent to Aristotle 
and Alexander by probably centuries, up to the Saracen 
conquest; the Arabian civilization carried it on into the 
fifteenth century, effectively cultivating a true philosophy 
of nature for at least eight hundred years ; then came our 
own modern civilization as developed and evolved in France, 
Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Great Britain. Its 
main progress has been observed during the last two or 
three centuries and its culmination, if culmination there be, 
has been observed during these last seventy-five years, 
since the establishment of existing systems of. power- 
production, of transportation and of manufactures — and 
the inauguration of our recently developed systems of 
public schooling and higher scientific and technical educa- 
tion. 

The study and investigation of mechanical science prac- 
tically began in Europe with the work of that wonderfully 
versatile engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, whose biographies, 
written by men utterly ignorant of his greatest achieve- 
ments, are devoted to accounts of his painting and sculp- 
ture, his verses and his travels and battles and sieges. 
Leonardo was the instigator of the sixteenth century 
renaissance of science and the technical arts and profes- 



14 

sions.* He was familiar with the Saracen literature and 
with their scientific work; their books and their learned 
men having come, by his time, into Italy and the south of 
France. He adopted research as the only guide in scien- 
tific matters, revived the Aristotelian and the Averroesian 
philosophical systems and applied these true methods to 
his work in applied mechanics, physics and all the natural 
sciences with which he, more than any other man of his 
day, probably, was familiar. His technical applications of 
the sciences were numerous and valuable and his familiarity 
with the literature and the science and with the learned 
men of his time gave currency to his productions that could 
not otherwise have been attained. He thus firmly founded 
the existing systems of thought and work in scientific and 
technical matters. All modern science and all contem- 
porary workers in scientific and technical fields, whether of 
the schools or of the professions or in research, owe more 
to Leonardo than the average student can realize. 

Finally came Newton and the great mathematicians, 
Lavoisier and the famous chemists, Boyle and the succeed- 
ing physicists, Watt and all the wonderful inventions of our 
century. By the end of the first quarter of this century the 
advancement due to all these developments was well under 
way and that world with which we are concerned took 
form. 

Times have thus strangely changed in these later centur- 
ies. In the middle ages and earlier, when all the world was 
composed of few masters and many men, when the great 
body of mankind was ruled, and individuality was unknown 
among nations, even education was directed by the masters 
of men, and church and state were alike phases of aristoc- 
racy. The curriculum was prescribed by monastic rule, and 
the so-called " four learned professions " were theology 
ruled by the church, law constructed and manipulated for 
the monarch, medicine the refuge of younger sons of the 
rulers, and philosophy the resort of wealthy and aristocratic 

*See particularly "II codice Atlantico di Leonardo da Vinci." Milano. 
1898. 



i5 

idlers. Engineering, the first and last and always essen- 
tial basis of civilization and of all true advancement in 
material wealth, the necessary accompaniment of advance- 
ment in learning and the promoter of the most vital moral 
and spiritual elevation, was unrecognized by Greek, Ro- 
man and modern European alike, during the centuries 
preceding the nineteenth. Great mechanics and engineers 
were deified in the days of mythology, but they were ignored 
and contemned throughout historic times until our own saw 
the beginning of a real renaissance of the aristocracy of 
ideas, of true knowledge and of noblest powers of the mind 
of man. Individualism and the care of the state for the in- 
dividual are the practical result of the progress of our own 
century. The Declaration of Independence and provision 
for the protection of the inventor are corner-stones in the 
foundation of the modern and current political creed, and 
the firm basis of this latest and only true development of 
the people. It is only when each elementary atom of a 
population is developed to its highest and best in knowledge, 
intelligence, independence and character that the great mass, 
the nation itself, becomes strongest and best. The specific 
gravity of its elementary molecule is that of the mightiest 
mass. Give the particles weight and value, and the mass 
assumes maximum value as a certain consequence. A hun- 
dred years ago the schools, the colleges and the universities 
of even Great Britain were inaccessible to the people of 
England ; those of the continent of Europe were reserved, 
practically, to aristocracy ; in the newly-organized United 
States of America, only, of all civilized countries, was edu- 
cation practically and legally free to all ranks and all classes. 
In these United States education was, from the first, recog- 
nized as the birthright of the people. 

In the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 it was writ- 
ten : " The encouragement of the arts and sciences and of 
all literature tends to the honor of God, the advantage of 
the Christian religion and the benefit of this and the other 
United States of America." Wisdom and knowledge, as 
well as virtue, were recognized as essential to the prosperity 
of a nation, and the cultivation of the arts and sciences, as 



well as of literature, was made a duty of legislatures in 
order that the rights and liberties of the people should be 
conserved. The great Northwest Territory was controlled 
by a primary law, the famous ordinance of 1787, in which it 
was declared that " Schools and the means of education 
shall be forever encouraged, the perfection of the individual 
as the elementary atom of the State being the end sought." 
Later came the slow but still advancing recognition of the 
necessities of the individual in the perfection of the school 
system and of the various forms of curriculum required in 
each grade and in each class of educational institutions. 
While it seems sometimes questionable whether, with our 
combinations of masters and of men, of corporations and of 
trusts, of classes and of masses, the individual is not being 
again deprived of that liberty and opportunity which seemed 
on the point of being fully insured him, it is to be noted 
that, in all these kaleidoscopic movements of the modern 
world, the individual still retains his right and his power to 
rise from stratum to stratum, to pass from class to class, to 
rise or fall, or to swerve from old into new courses, just as 
readily and just as far as his desires and his natural powers 
impel and permit. " Liberty always and everywhere insists 
on the use of all legitimate materials at hand for the attain- 
ment of its purposes. Such materials are ability, education, 
foresight, invention, personal influence and material re- 
sources."* Only individual liberty to move in any and 
every direction in which one's talents, tendencies, interests, 
proclivities lead can give true progress to individual or to 
nation. Freedom to secure, not simply an education, but 
just the sort of education that one's talents and inclinations 
or one's necessities may seem to call for, is one of the most 
vitally important of those rights which Magna Charta and 
the Declaration of Independence have assured to mankind. 
The placing of schools of engineering beside those of law 
and of medicine, the rehabilitation of the profession as one 
of the learned, as perhaps the most learned of, professions, 

* " Irresistible Tendencies." President Charles Kendall Adams. Atlantic 
Monthly, September, 1899, p. 293. 



17 

the general organization of courses of instruction in the 
arts and sciences — sciences applied as well as " pure " — and 
the extension of the school and college systems over the 
realms of technical, trade and professional instruction and 
training, have been the most obvious and fruitful results of 
the liberty of the individual and of the endeavors of our 
century to promote the interests of the citizen and through 
him the progress of the nation. 

While it is perfectly true that the evolution of education, 
including those branches which we distinctively call 
technical, covers a period extending back to the beginning 
of civilization, if not of human life on this globe, it is none 
the less true that more has been accomplished during our 
own century, more during the period of seventy-five years in 
the history of which we have here and now such special 
interest, than during the centuries, millenniums, which pre- 
ceded. 

Three remarkable developments of the present century, 
all the outcome of great social processes of evolution in 
various departments of our later civilization, have compelled 
the attention of students of history and of sociology in 
these later days ; illustrating the fact that all modern prog- 
ress has been made by advances of continuously increasing 
importance. The rate of progression under the action of 
the mighty forces which have become so sensible, in these 
decades which have seen substantially all the grandest 
movements of humanity, like that of a stone falling under 
action of gravitation, has been in each of these directions 
an acceleration. These three most wonderful accelerations 
have been: (i) the progress of invention and of the mechanic 
arts ; (2) the evolution of modern physical sciences ; (3) the 
advancement of systematic methods of cultivation of the 
mind. Progress in the mechanic arts and engineering, 
scientific discovery, and the construction of the sciences, 
and that form of intellectual training which we call educa- 
tion have all constituted most important characteristics of 
the progress of the century. 

At the beginning of this century the existing educational 
system had not taken form, and its most striking develop- 



ment, the education of a people for the life and work of a 
people, the supplementing of a purely — and most admirable 
and most desirable — gymnastic education by technical 
instruction and professional training in the industrial pro- 
fessions, had not become systematized. Especially is it the 
fact that the distinguishing characteristic of modern meth- 
ods of education, classic and scientific, technical and pro- 
fessional alike — the placing of the work of instruction, in 
every branch of the pantology of modern educations, in the 
hands of specialists and of experts, of men fitted by special 
education, by peculiar experience, and by natural proclivi- 
ties to communicate most of each special knowledge to the 
pupil — has only now, and even now not completely, come 
into the accepted platform and constitution of education. 
A generation ago, even, the proposition that, in education, 
as in all other departments of human activity, to insure 
success the work must be performed by the expert worker, 
was not admitted, and it was not unusual to place in charge 
of a department, or at the head of a college even, a man 
having no technical familiarity with the methods of the 
practitioner, whether mathematician or astronomer, chemist 
or physicist, engineer or classicist. Clergymen were given 
the place of the pedagogical expert ; lawyers were made 
heads of schools of engineering ; classicists were made 
presidents of schools of science ; and the idea of finding a 
man fitted by practical experience and natural talent for 
the position only properly assigned to an expert professional 
was unrecognized in the general confusion attending the 
construction and operation of the educational system. To- 
day all this is changed. Clergymen control the schools of 
theology, lawyers take in hand the schools of law, and en- 
gineers are taking the management of the schools of engi- 
neering ; and the latest and the least recognized forms of 
professional school are coming to be known as those exact- 
ing most of their students and adopting most extensive and 
intensive curricula.* 



* " Educational Problems. Electrical Engineering as a Profession." R.H. 
T. (Reprinted from the N. Y. Evening /W, September 10, 1898.) 



19 

A glance through the pages of history reveals the funda- 
mental thought of the modern and so-called education in 
the spoken and written words of philosophers of all ages, 
and its practical embodiment in the school systems has been 
witnessed, in some degree, at least, from the earliest his- 
toric times. The first great university, that which even 
now stands, its time and surroundings being considered, 
as the representative university of all time, that founded by 
the Ptolemies over two thousand years ago, included tech- 
nical learning and professional training in its curriculum, 
notwithstanding the anti-utilitarian sentiment of the Greek 
people and their philosophers and nobles. Astronomy and 
navigation, mechanics and engineering, mathematics and 
all then recognized applied sciences were there taught to 
all students and disciples by the most learned men of the 
time. The transfer of the arts and sciences and of all 
learning from Greece to Egypt, and by the Saracens to 
Spain, and from Spain and the shores of northern Africa to 
Europe, and through the centuries to our own times, has 
always been so effected as to maintain technical and profes- 
sional schools as a part of the system of education of every 
state, and the organization of the schools at Bologna and at 
Salerno in connection with the medical and legal profes- 
sions illustrated, centuries ago, the idea of the modern pro- 
fessional school. The Greek and the Roman and the Sara- 
cen and the modern European educations all alike were 
more than simply gymnastic and " classical ; " all included 
more or less, in varying degree at different periods, the 
technical and practical side of education. 

It was not, however, until the seventeenth century that 
special and precisely planned technical schools or depart- 
ments of the university became recognized necessities in 
the minds of many men, and applied sciences were seen to 
be the real and ultimate end of the pursuit of the knowl- 
edge of the pure sciences, and the gymnastic forms of educa- 
tion to have an ulterior and vital purpose in the promotion of 
the welfare of the people. Plato had declared education to 
be the business of the state, and the inference was inev- 
itable that the state should provide that education most 



20 

likely to advantage the people. Milton pleaded for a " com- 
plete and perfect " education that should " fit a man to per- 
form justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, 
both private and public, of peace and war." Bacon had 
the same thought, and Comenius, his disciple, planned a 
real " university," to include in its faculty men of science 
learned in the applications of science in the arts as well as 
men learned in languages and literatures. The Marquis of 
Worcester, the inventor of one of the modern steam- 
engines, the exponent for his time of the truly broad and 
university- educated man, urged upon his monarch the 
organization of a system of technical schools for the pur- 
pose of promoting the highest interests of the nation ; 
Descartes sought the same result in a similar manner in 
France, and, in that century, while all the sciences were 
taking new forms and making new and extraordinary prog- 
ress through the then new systems of scientific research, 
the perfection and completing of the educational systems 
was a prominent thought in the minds of many of the 
greatest men of the day. Descartes, in fact, proposed a 
sort of Franklin Institute in which should be provided 
lectureships and schools for the people, a people's technical 
university — if that term, thus applied by John Scott Rus- 
sell, may be admitted — in which the systematic and scien- 
tific development of all the educations likely to help the 
people to prepare themselves for the sequel of their lives 
should be effected. The foundation of the French " Conser- 
vatoire' des Arts et Metiers," by the great inventor and me- 
chanic, Vaucanson, was probably the first important actual 
embodiment of the ideas which had been familiar to Plato, 
to Aristotle, to the Ptolemies and their successors in the 
realm of education, in later times. Martin Luther was 
among these successors, and he and other great German 
educators early adopted the views of the leaders of thought 
of the preceding centuries. Germany was the first nation to 
put in practice the thesis of Plato and to inaugurate, for- 
mally and with considerable extent and symmetry, the sys- 
tems of modern technical education of the people for the life 
and work of the people, and magnificently, as we may now 



21 

perceive, has that nation profited by such wisdom and prac- 
tical statecraft. To-day the German system of national 
education is the admiration of the world. It is now a half 
century since John Scott Russell made his first study of 
those schools of the people of which he wrote in 1869 so 
glowing a panegyric."* They have steadily improved and 
broadened their field from that day to this, and are still im- 
proving and maintaining their lead over other nations in 
many ways, although, if we may accept the judgment of 
some of their own ablest educators and professional men, 
our own country has, during the present generation, 
struck on in advance of them in some departments in 
methods and curricula. Trotzendorf, Sturm, Neander and 
Comenius, Spencer and Francke, Basedort and Pestalozzi 
and Hecker built foundations upon which arose a great sys- 
tem of useful and stimulating education of every class in. 
the community, and in such manner as should give to all the 
power of making the most and best of every God-given fac- 
ulty, physical, intellectual and spiritual. This system re- 
vivified and regenerated the German nation much as, in 
these later days, the " land-grant " legislation of our own 

* " Twenty years ago professional duty took me to Germany for the first 
time. I cannot forget my impression at the sight of whole nations growing 
up in the full enjoyment of systematic, organized, I might almost say perfect, 
education. I had already become acquainted with some theories and forms 
of education. I had read Plato's description of the perfect training for a na- 
tion. I was familiar with elementary school-teaching, and enjoyed the privi- 
leges of university education and the still higher education of the workshop. 
I was familiar with the system of Bell and Lancaster, having had personal 
acquaintance with its authors, and had myself taken an active part in schools 
of art and mechanics' institutions, but I confess to have been profoundly as- 
tonished—I may say humiliated — at the sight of nations whose rulers had 
chosen to undertake the systematic education of their people, and of peoples 
who had chosen to bear the burdens and to make the sacrifices necessary to 
obtain it. I do not know to what men or class of men in Germany the fore- 
thought, organization, and patriotism are to be attributed which made them 
lay aside personal ambition, political animosity, religious sectarianism, and 
state parsimony in order to unite all the classes of people in a unanimous 
effort to raise every rank in society to a higher condition of personal excel- 
lence and usefulness, and, by diffusing equality of education, to extinguish 
the most grievous of class distinctions." — " Systematic Technical Education;" 
John Scott Russell. London. 1869. 



22 

country has inaugurated a new system and new views of the 
needs of the people and the duties of the state. It made evi- 
dent the fact that, as Russell states the point, the education 
of the nation is to be divided into two distinct divisions, 
logically : the one, that which " educates and matures the 
man, and which we call ' general education;'" the other, 
that which " specially qualifies the citizen for fulfilling that 
narrow round of duties which the subdivisions of labor in 
civilized countries impose on the individual as his special 
contribution to the commonwealth and which we may call 
special or technical." In Germany, Russell found, as you 
or I may find to-day, the most systematic and economical 
and fruitful, the most " complete and perfect " national or- 
ganization for the special care of this second division of 
educational work that the world has yet seen. 

When, in our own country, we secure the union of this 
German national system of administration and this com- 
plete distribution of the statesman's care over all classes 
and in all localities, with our own peculiar and specially 
efficient system of union of the scientific with the practical, 
the combination of gymnastic teaching with scientific ex- 
perimental methods of the laboratory, in all departments 
and in all technical and professional work, we shall have 
attained very nearly the ideal of Milton and of the great 
educators and the real statesmen of our own time. This 
must soon come. The course of modern progress in this 
department of national life has been practically one which 
has a history, as we have seen, dating back to the earliest 
days of Greek culture ; but real progress, with acceleration 
of measurable degree, really began in the times of Milton 
and of Bacon, took on importance with the organization of 
the German national system of technical and professional 
education in connection with the older gymnastic systems, 
and assumed visible importance at about the time of the 
incorporation of the great enterprise whose accomplish- 
ments we here and now celebrate. During this century, and 
particularly since the last generation took a hand in the 
work, progress has been steady and increasingly rapid. 
Another generation should see our own country provided 



23 

with' an educational system, perfect and complete, broad as 
the continent, deep as modern life and rich and fruitful as 
the best thought of the wisest educators and greatest states- 
men can make it. 

Every State and every nation owes to its people the or- 
ganization of a general system of education — not abstract 
and ideal, not fitted to the purposes of the well-to-do citi- 
zens solely, not planned from the point of view of the older 
academician or fitted into the ancient monastic scheme — a 
system adapted to the immediate and practical needs of a 
great body of civilized people endeavoring to live and work 
and to enjoy the privileges of modern civilization, on an 
average income of between $600 and $700 a year for a 
family, in the settled portions of the country ; when this is 
understood, the question finds easy solution — in words. 
The difficulties of securing the inauguration, in even our 
enlightened country, of such a system, in the face of long- 
standing prejudice, of existing and established curricula 
of the ancient and cloisteral type, of indifference on the 
part of politicians filling places belonging to statesmen, of 
ignorance, on the part not only of the average citizen and 
voter, but even on the part of the intelligent men of the 
country, very few of whom have given time to investigation, 
or thought to this most important of economical subjects, 
are beyond estimate. These difficulties, however, are cer- 
tain to be in time overcome, for their removal is essential 
to the progress of our country in its great career. 

The classification may, perhaps, take some such form as 
this :* 

(a) A common-school system of general education pro- 
viding the elementary studies of a good English education, 
perfecting the pupil in the arts of reading, writing and 



* This scheme was substantially constructed as here presented by the writer 
when, as member of the New Jersey Commission for Devising a Plan for En- 
couragement of Manufacturing Industries in that State and, as Secretary of 
the Commission, he prepared for the Commission such a scheme. 

See Report of New Jersey State Commission, Trenton, 1878 ; also Sibley 

Journal of Engineering, June, 1892 ; "The Demands of the State ;'.' also the 

Trans. Am. Soc. M. E., 1892, Vol. XIV; and Trans. Am. Soc. for Promotion 

of Engineering Education, 1898; " Organization of Engineering Courses/' etc. 



2 4 

arithmetic, at least, and with so much of the most essen- 
tial primary work in language, geography, etc., as space can 
be found for, without reducing the vitally important work 
to inefficiency. This system should be adapted to the needs 
of all classes. 

(b) A system of special adaptation of primary instruction 
to the needs of children who must become skilled artisans 
and who cannot be kept in school by their parents longer 
than during the period of their growth to that size and age 
at which they can be made to assist in the support of the 
family. Such a system may, perhaps, prove to require 
special adaptation of text-books to the purpose, in which 
text-books the terms of the trades, and reading matter giv- 
ing accounts of industrial processes, may be introduced. 

(c) A system of trade-schools in which general and special 
instruction may be given pupils preparing to enter the lead- 
ing industries, in which schools the principles underlying 
the principal vocations of the locality are to be taught and 
the essential actual manipulations of the trades are to be 
illustrated and taught by practical exercises until the pupil 
becomes expert. 

Thus, the Germans have besprinkled all over their coun- 
try schools of carpentry, blacksmithing, weaving, bleaching 
and dyeing, forestry, agriculture, etc. 

These schools should be established in every city and 
town in the State. 

(d) Polytechnic schools should be incorporated, formally 
and with system, into the great educational scheme of the 
State and of the country, in which higher work in the 
applied sciences and, usually, some trade or professional 
instruction should be offered students whose circumstances 
are such that they may be given an education extending 
toward the years of maturity and whose talents and incli- 
nations lead them to select technical school work as intro- 
ductory to their later practice of the industrial arts. 

(e) Technical schools and colleges and professional schools 
within the colleges and universities, in which the highest 
professional instruction in the applied sciences and in the 
scientific basis of the profession may be offered those who 



25 

are permitted by rare good fortune to secure a good, a lib- 
eral education while preparing for entrance into the profes- 
sional school and upon their chosen line of life-work. 

(/) Such a bureaucratic system of supervision and con- 
duct, presumably by the State, acting through experts in all 
branches of educational work, and all imbued with the Mil- 
tonian idea, as will insure symmetry and efficiency of the 
whole great structure of education of the people for the life 
and work of the people. 

(g) In the United States the work of the several States 
should, it would seem, be correlated by a great central, a 
national organization, a national university, presumably, to 
which all lines should converge straight from the most ele- 
mentary of the primary departments and schools, through 
the whole system of academic and technical secondary 
schools and State colleges and universities, and which 
should thus serve at once as a source of authority and of in- 
structing talent of the loftiest character ; providing men of 
genius and giving grandest educational advantages to all 
the lower grades ; raising up the level to which the tide of 
culture may rise in attaining the highest possible altitude, 
and serving, further, as the ultimate goal of the great minds 
of the nation. 

{h) National bureaux of education having enlarged pow- 
ers, wider duties and grander opportunities of engaging in 
the task of instituting and promoting systematic and gen- 
eral education, such as Milton would have approved, and 
serving as the great advisory and directing agents in the 
permanent task of maintaining and improving the symmetry 
and completeness of the whole national, State and local sys- 
tems of general and special education. 

Supplementing all these, and doing a work that cannot 
be performed by any system of public teaching in classes and 
schools, should be found in every city and town such insti- 
tutions as this in Philadelphia, lending a hand to the ambi- 
tious and less fortunate members of the body politic who 
have been unable to secure the advantages of systematic in- 
struction or who, having neglected opportunities of this sort 
in earlier life, later are awakened to the desirability of per- 



26 

fecting and completing an imperfect and incomplete educa- 
tion. 

The grand developments in the direction of the education 
of the people for the life and work of the people, in these 
later times, have thus far been : 

(i) The institution of the system of common school edu- 
cation in the United States, a system unequalled even now 
elsewhere, giving to every citizen a preparation for a life 
worth living, such as no people ever had before. 

(2) The organization, first in France, of great technical 
schools under the supervision of the government, in which 
the older professional methods of training are adopted in 
the preparation of youth for the professions of the construc- 
tive arts and engineering. 

(3) The establishment by Germany, in more complete 
form, of a system of national schools, manual training, trade 
and higher technical, such as is represented, in type, by 
the great Prussian school at Charlottenburg, near Berlin. 

(4) The organization of special, isolated, usually privately 
endowed, polytechnic and engineering schools, like those 
of the United States and Great Britain, and which are 
typified by our military and naval academies, the Troy 
Polytechnic Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
nology, the Stevens Institute of Technology and the Drexel 
Institute. 

(5) The development of State universities devoted, in 
fair proportion, to the instruction of students in technical 
departments and schools under the patronage and care of 
the State, somewhat after the manner of the common 
schools— a system which finds its highest development in 
the Middle and Western States in this country, and which 
forms part of the whole educational system of the State. 
The existence of large and privately endowed colleges and 
universities in the Eastern States has prevented equal de- 
velopment on this side the Alleghenies. 

" What is wanted in our day is that complete and per- 
fect representative of one great and all-embracing system 
which shall, for its time, do what was done by the grandest 
of all ancient institutions, the greatest of all the ancient 



27 

* wonders of the world,' in its day — offer to all-comers oppor- 
tunity to study and to pursue all the sciences, all the liter- 
atures and all the arts of the contemporary civilization. 
Ezra Cornell expressed the ideas of Plato and of Aristotle 
and of Milton and of John Scott Russell in a sentence : ' I 
would found an institution in which any person can find 
instruction in any study.' 

" This Cornellian ambition, absurd as it may seem to the 
dull plodder in the ways of the mediaeval educator and of 
the monastic regime, is precisely that of the German Em- 
pire and of its constituent political elements of the earlier 
generations, since the time of Luther. 

" Once it is recognized as a great principle of politics 
and economics that the primary duty of the State — given a 
system of government which steadily maintains the law and 
preserves the peace — is to see that the people are taught to 
make themselves competent to make the most of life and 
of the marvellous opportunities which modern civilization 
presents to all men, the obvious universality of the scheme 
of public education and training 'for the sequel of the lives' 
of citizens is instantly recognized, and its practicability in 
a reasonable sense as well ; for the powers of the State are 
to be invoked to their utmost limits."* 

While common schools, as we know them, were organized 
in the older States during the colonial period, and in the 
newer States with the adoption of their constitutions and the 
formation of their State or even of their territorial govern- 
ments, it was not until about 1825 that the condition of the 
country, industrially and politically, had become so well 
settled that the attention of the people could be given with- 
out distraction to the solution of the great problems in- 
volved in their thorough organization. Since then our 
present universal and remarkably efficient common school 
education has taken shape and has come to constitute the 
foundation of all secondary and higher education, liberal, 
classical, even technical and professional. To-day, the 



* " On the Organization of Engineering Courses, etc. :" " Trans. Am. Soci- 
ety for Promotion of Engineering Education," R. H. T. ; 1898. 



28 

whole population of our country is at least educated in the 
common schools if not in the higher departments of our 
school and college system. This is the solid and enduring 
basis of the intellectual and social, and largely even of the 
moral, life of our nation. 

The organization of the great technical schools of Europe, 
the progenitors of our own technical and industrial schools, 
may perhaps be properly said to have begun with the in- 
auguration, in 1785, of the French "Conservatoire Imperial 
des Arts et Metiers," as it is officially called. The establish- 
ment was, in 1793, placed in the hands of a "Commission 
temporaire des Arts," and, still later, the present title was 
conferred upon it by a decree of the " Convention Nationale." 
The " Commission temporaire " was fortunately able to pre- 
serve the splendid collections uninjured during the dis- 
turbed period of revolution in which they had charge of 
them, and even procured from the Convention a decree 
making their charge a " depot public " and authorizing the 
appointment of three " demonstrateurs " and a designer to 
conduct a course of instruction. A little later, the whole 
establishment was domiciled in the old priory of Saint- 
Martin-des-Champs. On its faculty-lists have been num- 
bered many of the greatest names known to France and 
the world — Thenard, Charles, Darcet, Dupin, Clement,. 
Berthollet, Gay Lussac, Arago, Pouillet, Poncelet, Ollivier,. 
Bequerel, Moll, Alcorn, Tresca, Morin and Laussedat 
are names familiar throughout the civilized world. 

The Conservatoire was not actually constituted a school 
of technical instruction, however, until 18 19, and it has 
never been a school for the workingmen of France, but has 
been devoted to the education of students for the higher 
positions in the industrial system and to the training of 
professional engineers. 

A more typical example of the form of industrial school 
which is most effective in the development of manufactures 
and the arts is the later " Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manu- 
factures," founded at Paris in 1829. This school was taken 
in charge by the government in 1858, and has since that 
time formed a part of that general system of industrial 



2 9 

education to which France so largely owes her present posi- 
tion as a wealthy and prosperous nation. Students from all 
parts of France and from other countries as well are ad- 
mitted. Although large numbers of the students are for- 
eigners, this institution remains, as it was said by M. Morin 
and M. Tresca, " pour l'industrie, une des forces princi- 
pales " of France.* Founded originally by an association 
of scientific men, which included MM. Dumas, Peclet, 
Olivier and others hardly less distinguished, it stood un- 
aided nearly thirty years, and finally became one of the 
pillars of the state, and to-day furnishes a large proportion 
of the civil engineers of France.f 

Other schools — as the Ecole Polytechnique, l'Ecole des 
Ponts et Chaussees at Paris, l'Ecole des Mines at St. Etienne, 
and that at Alais, l'Ecole des Arts et Metiers at Chalons, 
those at Aix and elsewhere, and the " Ecoles Industrielles " 
at Mulhouse, Lyons, Lille and in other cities — aid in mak- 
ing the system of industrial education of France admirably 
perfect. These schools, with the exception of the " Ecoles 
Industrielles," are under the direction of the state. 

The trade schools are usually founded by municipal 
authority, and are under the direction of the city govern- 
ments creating them. They fit young men to become good 
workmen and excellent superintendents. They are devoted 
peculiarly to instruction in the practical operations which 
constitute the trades. The " Polytechnique," which is, in a 
certain sense, the highest of the French technical schools, 
is largely, perhaps principally, a school of mathematics and 
of the pure allied sciences. L'Ecole Centrale is the highest 
of the properly so-called industrial schools, and educates 
leading manufacturers and the directors of great industrial 
establishments. 

The trade schools of Chalons, Aix and Angers were or- 
ganized by a decree of December 30, 1865, for the instruc- 



*" De 1' Organization de l'Enseignement industriel et de l'Enseignement 
profession el." 

t Letter from General Morin to Mr. Jas. Forrest, Secretary of the British 
Institution of Civil Engineering. 



30 

tion of all workers in wood and iron, and are only allowed 
to receive resident pupils, who are selected from among- 
applicants for admission by a competitive examination. 
The German schools in which engineers or artisans are 
trained may be reduced to the following groups : 

(i) Polytechnic or technical high schools, in which the 
principles and practice of engineering are taught, some- 
times with the aid of a workshop, but generally without it. 
The graduates aspire to be managing engineers of mines, 
railroads, manufacturing establishments, etc., each accord- 
ing to his special preparation. 

(2) Intermediate technical schools, subdivided into (1) 
general technical schools, (2) weaving schools, (3) indus- 
trial art schools. The general technical schools may be 
classified into (a) higher elementary technical schools, (b) 
secondary technical schools, (c) building and mining schools. 
The graduates of these schools expect to become foremen 
in shops and works, with the possibility of attaining to a 
manager's position. 

(3) Apprenticeship schools for the training of skilled 
workmen. » 

(4) Evening schools, available for artisans. These are 
attended by men who during the day follow their craft. 
The "Fortbildungsschulen," or continuation schools, belong- 
in this category. 

(5) Trade and professional schools for women. 

This classification may be still further simplified in rela- 
tion to mechanical engineers, foremen and artisans, and 
all schools devoted to their service will fall under one of the 
following heads: (1) polytechnic schools, with or without 
workshops ; (2) secondary technical schools ; (3) apprentice- 
ship schools ; (4) trade schools. 

For admission, the polytechnics require sometimes more 
than the equivalent of an American college course, as the 
Ecole Polytechnique ; sometimes the equivalent of a full 
course at the Realschule, as at the German polytechnics ; 
sometimes, the best that the preparatory schools can give, 
as at the Imperial Institute of Technology at St. Peters- 
burg. The range and severity of the requirements for 



3i 

admission gradually diminish till, in the apprenticeship 
schools, only the rudiments of knowledge are demanded. 

The " Gymnasia " in Germany are preparatory schools 
for the " Polytechnicum " as well as for the university ; but 
the special preparatory schools for the former are usually 
the " Realschule." 

In Europe, the custom has come to be almost universal 
to isolate the technical schools from the classical institu- 
tions and older universities. This has come about partly 
through the conviction that better work will be done by 
each class of college if allowed to work unhampered by the 
different methods and even the conflicting views, feelings, 
and traditions of the other, partly, perhaps, in consequence 
of their different foundations. Many able men favor each 
system, and the amalgamation of the university and the 
technical school is likely to be given faithful trial here and 
there on the continent, and in Great Britain perhaps still 
more completely; but they are to-day separately administered 
practically in nearly all cases. The view of the relative 
importance of manual and of gymnastic training of the 
mind which prevails generally in Europe is that, in the 
higher schools of technology at least, the training of the 
hands constitutes no part of the essential education of the 
engineer even, and that these schools should confine them- 
selves entirely to the instruction of the student in the prin- 
ciples of his art, avoiding the practice, so far as it involves 
the use of the hands. It is perhaps a consequence of this 
belief and practice that the states of Europe have been, for 
years past, flooded with well-educated, untrained young 
aspirants for entrance into this vocation who not only have 
been unable to find employment, but who have, in many in- 
stances, been informed by employers that they are not 
wanted. It is the man who suitably unites theoretical and 
practical knowledge and training who is wanted and who 
best succeeds, in Germany no less than in the United 
States. The view held by so many of the higher schools 
of Germany and of France is that formerly inspiring the 
"Ecole Polytechnique " at Paris, the first institution, work- 
ing on the highest theoretical plane, produced in Europe. 



32 

Throughout Germany, technical schools and colleges, 
and trade schools are distributed so numerously that the 
visitor from the United States is not only impressed by the 
completeness of the system and by its universality, but is 
oppressed by the apprehension that his own country, un- 
provided with such efficient and essential means of giving 
to the people a good industrial education, and apparently 
having few citizens who understand the bearing of that 
fact upon the future prospects of the nation, as well as upon 
the character and attainments and upon the happiness and 
prosperity of the people, is likely to suffer severely when, in 
the near future, direct competition with this educated and 
trained nation of artisans shall produce those sad conse- 
quences against which history has over and over again 
warned us. 

After their northern neighbors had inaugurated the new 
systems and methods of education, the Swiss commenced 
on a similar plan, and established a noble school at Zurich, 
where they placed some of the greatest instructors in Eu- 
rope, and opened their " Polytechnicum " to the students 
from all parts of the world.* More than one-half the pupils 
are from other countries. The faculty consists of over a 
hundred professors, assistants and private teachers, and 
the number of students is above one thousand. 

In Great Britain, the government and the people of that 
country have initiated trade schools and technical and in- 
dustrial instruction in a few cities, and in connection with 
such institutions as King's College, the University, and the 
Crystal Palace Schools, in London ; Owen's College, Man- 
chester ; Trinity College and others. 

American schools, so far as developed in the United 
States, have been established, usually, by the several States, 
in compliance with an agreement entered into by them 
with the United States Government, under the terms of the 
Morrill Act, of 1862, the " Land Grant Bill." 

Three-quarters of a century ago, the people of the United 
States entered upon one of those periods of renaissance in 

* " Race Education." Sam'l Royce. New York, 1878. 



33 

education which, at intervals of a few years, have marked 
the progress of educational work in this country, and 
" manual labor " schools were established in many places, 
in which the college course of education was accompanied 
by a course of manual labor, either with or without com- 
pensation. A " Manual Labor Academy " was opened in 1 829 
at Philadelphia, which was said to be remarkably successful, 
the students employing their hours of rest from study in 
various kinds of bodily work. " Every invalid resorting to 
this academy in the year 1830 was restored to health." 

A number of the States were provided with such schools 
by legislative action, and in several others, private enter- 
prise did what the State governments had not done in this 
way. Among others, the Stockbridge Academy, in New 
Jersey, introduced this change into its program, and 
Gerrit Smith secured a similar arrangement for New York 
State at Peterboro. 

A report to the House of Representatives of Pennsyl- 
vania, in 1832, indicated: 

(1) That the expenses of education could thus be reduced 
one-half. 

(2) That three hours' work per day had an important 
beneficial effect upon the health and strength and in pro- 
moting good spirits among students. 

(3) That it had an equally useful effect upon the intellec- 
tual advancement of students. 

(4) That such a system is advantageous in that it aids 
the impecunious student to obtain advantages in education 
which are ordinarily enjoyed by the rich only. 

(5) That students thus trained make better citizens and 
more successful men than when not thus physically trained. 

The Land Grant Colleges of the United States — of the 
several States, rather — are the product of one of the grand- 
est examples of statesmanlike legislation that the world has 
yet seen — one second in importance and fruitfulness to no 
act of legislation subsequent to the promulgation of the 
Constitution of the United States. Like all great enter- 
prises having for their purpose the benefit of the people by 
legislative enactment, this failed of complete success 

3* 



34 

through the indifference, the folly, or the absolute stupidity 
of many of those public servants to whom its operation 
was entrusted ; it has, nevertheless, produced incalculable 
good, both directly, in the foundation and partial support 
of technical education, and indirectly, and very probably to 
a vastly greater extent, through its influence upon the 
States, inducing them to take up and carry on the work' 
from the point at which the General Government left it. 
It is largely to this legislation that the foundation of the 
now numerous State universities is due, and the organiza- 
tion of the systems of State education which now more or 
less completely cover the whole field from primary schools 
to universities in a large proportion of our States, illustrat- 
ing the scheme of a complete system of State education to 
which reference was made, and of which the outline was 
given in the earlier part of this discussion, more satisfactorily 
than anywhere else outside of Germany. 

The author of the Land Grant Bill, by which colleges of 
the useful arts were established in every State in the Union 
at the date of its passage, was Justin S. Morrill, then Senator 
from Vermont, who introduced the Bill in 1858, and secured 
its passage by a small majority, only to see it vetoed by 
James Buchanan, then President of the United States. But 
the statesmen who sought thus to perpetuate the strongest 
safeguard of the nation, the effective education of the peo- 
ple, lost none of their interest or enthusiasm, and persevered 
in their plan, bringing the Bill before the next Congress and 
the next, and finally they had the satisfaction of seeing this 
measure become a law during the administration of Lincoln 
and in the midst of the dark days of the war. " The genius 
of Lincoln rose to the occasion. With one hand he smote 
off the fetters of the slave ; with the other he joined in a 
splendid effort to subjugate nature. On the second of July, 
1862, while the announcement of emancipation was still on 
his desk, he signed the Act of Congress donating public 
lands for the establishment of colleges of agriculture and the 
mechanic arts." 

In most cases the States complied fully with the terms 
of the Act — some of them more than completely. In the 



35 

majority of the States the funds were invested in either 
State bonds or in a special bond made out for this particular 
purpose by the State and deposited in its treasury, and the 
returns were either the prescribed 5 per cent, or something 
more, in every case except that of the State of New York, 
which latter State never, until compelled by the courts, 
complied either in letter or in spirit with the law. Maine 
and Indiana paid 5 per cent. ; New Hampshire, Vermont, 
Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina and Ohio paid 6, 
the funds being paid into their treasuries. Massachusetts 
was the only State in which the fund was divided, most 
of the State legislatures deciding at once and unhesitatingly 
that it would be better to hold the fund undivided and to 
either give it to some existing institution which should com- 
ply with the provisions of the grant, or founding an institu- 
tion, as Cornell University, in the State of New York, in 
direct compliance with the terms of the law. 

The following is a summary of the contributions made 
to the cause of " education of the people by the people for 
the people " from the earlier days of the Republic :* 

(1) Lands by the township, under Acts of 1787 and 1800, 
amounting to over 1,000,000 acres, for the support of State 
universities. 

(2) A considerable but unascertained proportion of the 
money surplus of $28,000,000 distributed to the States in 
1836 and never recalled. 

(3) A portion of the $3,500,000 constituting the share of 
education in the total proceeds of land-sales under the Per- 
centage Acts of 1 841 and later. 

(4) A portion of the 3,500,000 acres accorded by different 
States to education out of the 9,500.000 acres given by 
Congress in 1841 for internal improvements. 

(5) Further important sums not definitely known, from 
the sale of over 50,000,000 acres of swamp lands disposed 
of under provisions of the Act of 1850, from which source 



* Blackmar's Report, of 1890, to the Bureau of Education. Hoyt's Report, 
of 1S92, to the Senate Committee on a National University. Thurston's 
"Technical Education in the United States," "Trans. A. S. M. E.," 1S93. 



36 

alone the University of California is said to have derived 
important aid. 

(6) Revenues in a number of States from the sale of 
saline lands, with appropriations thereof to the support of 
colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts. 

(7) The more than $15,000,000 already derived from the 
lands accorded to States by the Act of July 2, 1862, for the 
support of colleges and the mechanic arts ; which grant 
has resulted not only in the establishment of many im- 
portant technical institutions, but also at the same time 
in such strengthening of the State universities that some 
of them are thus early taking their places in the foreground 
of the great university field. 

(8) The appropriation by Act of March 2, 1887, of $15,000 
per annum to each State for experimental purposes in aid 
of scientific agriculture in the broadest sense of that term, 
a yet further incidental reinforcement of the many State 
universities.* 

(9) The aggregate of over $20,000,000 appropriated for 
the support of the Military Academy at West Point and 

, the Naval Academy at Annapolis. 

(10) The establishment, equipment and support of the 
Naval Observatory and the purely scientific bureaus of the 
Government at Washington. 

(11) The large sums of money appropriated for the con- 
venience and support of the Congressional and departmental 
libraries. 

(12) The hundreds of thousands expended in buildings 
for the scientific museums of the Government, and the more 
than $3,000,000 a year so wisely granted for their support. 

Since the date of this report, the nation and various 
States have annually added hundreds of thousands of dol- 
lars to these great sums. 

Of the now famous special schools, our U. S. Military 

* The State of New York, as stated in the message of the Governor, for 
1892-93, taught in the public schools 1,073,093 children in the year 1892, and 
772,426 were either educated in private schools or were not taught at all. The 
vState expended in this work $21,134,516, which was $865,000 more than was 
paid out, on the same account, in 1891. 



37 

Academy was the first to take form, founded as it was in 
1802; the Naval Academy was organized in 1845 and both 
have sustained a high reputation for the excellence of their 
curricula and the high scholarship of their graduates. The 
first of the independent schools privately endowed was the 
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at Troy, N. Y., and its 
success led to the organization of many other schools of 
engineering in the succeeding generation. The Lawrence 
Scientific School was attached to Harvard University in 
1847 ; the Department of Civil Engineering of the Univer- 
sity of Michigan was organized in 1852; the Sheffield Scien- 
tific School was organized at Yale University in 1847, 
though much earlier proposed. The Massachusetts Insti- 
tute of Technology was founded in 1864; Dartmouth College 
organized its technical departments in 185 1 and the Thayer 
School in 1867. The Worcester Polytechnic Institute took 
form in 1868 and the Columbia College School of Mines in 
1863. Peter Cooper founded the Cooper Institute in 1854 
as a mixed educational and trade school and especially for 
the benefit of artisans and others unable to attend regularly 
the common and technical schools of regular curricula. 
The Stevens Institute of Technology (1871) organized as the 
first American school distinctively and especially devoted 
to the professional training of mechanical engineers and 
for the first time recognized that branch of engineering as 
a profession. The Towne Scientific School of the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania and the technical departments 
of Cornell University were organized m 1868, and about 
1885 the latter became recognized as colleges under the 
university organization. Since 1870, there have been 
almost annually organized and endowed schools of manual 
training, trade schools and polytechnic and professional 
engineering schools, until to-day every great city is pro- 
vided with one or more. Philadelphia and Chicago are 
peculiarly fortunate in this respect. Nearly every large 
college or university has nominally, if not actually, profes- 
sional and technical schools incorporated into its organiza- 
tion and the majority are doing admirable work in these 
directions. There are, to-day, about 100 reputable technical 



38 

and engineering schools in the United States and they an- 
nually graduate about 1,000 students into the constructive 
professions. 

The Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania, in 
its work of promotion of the mechanic arts, has taken no 
small part in the development of these modern systems of 
evolution of the Miltonian. idea. During the seventy-five 
years which have, to date, measured its period of useful 
life it has performed an enormous amount of helpful work 
in a variety of ways.* Its endeavors have always been 
effective in the union of science with practice ; its member- 
ship has always included men of science and men of busi- 
ness, educators and philosophers and great mechanics; its 
work has always been carried on in fields of applied science 
with every apparatus of instruction, schools, lectures, sys- 
tems of research, exhibitions of invention and construction,, 
and all methods of promotion of technical training of young 
and old, learned and unlearned. The names of Ronaldson, 
Cresson, Rogers, the Merricks and the Sellers, of Bache and 
Morton and Wilson, Tatham, Heyl and Sartain, of Jones and 
Longstreth and Norris and Trautwine and Houston, and 
many others familiar to the world, have adorned a catalogue 
of officers and members such as perhaps can hardly be par- 
alleled in any other State or in any other country. 

The Institute has established and has carried on all 
these decades technical lectures, drawing schools, even a high 
school for a time ; it has gathered together a very extensive, 
unique and valuable technical free library and has even 
published scientific and practical treatises, either officially 
or indirectly ; it has printed, for now over seventy years, its 
Journal of the Franklin Institute, complete files of which have 
been probably more extensively and for a longer time main- 
tained in the libraries and technical institutions of this 
country and of Europe than have been those of any other 
existing publication of its sort on either side the Atlantic. 

* For a detailed account of its work, see " A Sketch of its Organization and 
History," by Dr. Wm. H. Wahl, Secretary of the Institute ; published by the 
Institute, 1895. 



39 

It has even longer maintained, a " Committee on Science 
and the Arts," empowered to examine and report on inven- 
tions and advances in the mechanic arts and applied sci- 
ences. The files of the Journal are rich in contributions of 
useful and extensively important matter from this commit- 
tee. Medals and premiums have been offered and awarded 
for great inventions and improvements in the arts and in 
mechanisms, and the careful investigation of claims and 
the selection of worthy objects of such honors by the repre- 
sentatives of the Institute has been of immense assistance 
in the promotion of the highest material interests of our 
country. These gratuitous services have never been and 
can never be adequately appreciated or recognized. These 
committees and the Journal have always been under careful 
surveillance by the best men of city and State. The editor- 
ship of the Journal has illustrated this fact, for its list con- 
tains the names of Dr. Thos. P. Jones, Alexander Dallas 
Bache, C. B. Trego, Profs. John F. Frazer, Henry Morton 
and Geo. F. Barker, Robert Briggs, and two periods of ser- 
vice are assigned to Dr. Wm. H. Wahl, the present Secre- 
tary and editor. The Committee on Publication, always 
supervising the work with conscientious care, has consisted, 
also, of the best men in the membership of the Institute. It 
may well be doubted if any journal in the world has a richer 
list of technical contributions. 

The great exhibition of American manufactures of 1824 
and its successors have had an immense influence in the 
improvement of all the arts and manufactures of our coun- 
try. In that of 1874 more than 200 silver and over 220 
bronze medals and 650 diplomas were awarded to as many 
deserving products of American invention and skill. The 
electrical exhibition of 1884 probably did more to show 
what were the prospects of the then infant industry than 
any other incident or influence of the time. It was the first 
of its kind, and gave a prodigious impetus to that vocation 
and those many industries which are to-day grouped within 
the special field of electrical engineering. The greatest 
men of science, the most famous mechanics and the ablest 
manufacturers of mechanism found there attractions and 



, 



40 

impressive novelties that had hitherto been to them almost 
undreamed of. A National Conference of Electricians, 
then necessarily mainly composed of physicists — for this 
branch of mechanical engineering had not then taken form 
as a department of construction or a division of the profes- 
sion of engineering — was organized, and the officers of the 
exhibition and this congress, together, laid the foundations 
of the vast structure now constituting such an imposing 
division of our industrial system. 

Researches like those described in the report of the com- 
mittee organized to investigate the theory and practice of 
hydraulic motor construction, in the report on steam-boiler 
explosions, still an engineer's classic, and in that of the 
committee investigating the strength of the materials of 
construction, were at once useful and impressive. A Weather 
Bureau, even, was organized in 1843, an d the later State 
weather-service and that of the United States may be fairly 
claimed to have grown out of that first work of this kind. 
The now universal system of standard screw-threads was 
the product of the studies of another committee, and the 
later investigations of water-supply for the city of Phila- 
delphia, of the efficiencies of dynamo-electric machines and 
of the duration and efficiency of electric lamps, have con- 
tinued the early-established practice of the Institute into 
our own time. 

All this enormous amount of work in the promotion of 
the useful arts and applied sciences has been the voluntary 
service of able men, and not a dollar has been expended for 
their precious and invaluable time and thought and labor. 
It may well be doubted whether the history of any country 
or of any institution gives nobler exemplification of true 
patriotism. 

The work of this now famous institution has not been 
simply, however, in the departments which have been men- 
tioned ; it has done a great work in aiding other enterprises. 
For a century and more this country, following the lead of 
its great statesmen of the days of the Revolution and of 
the early period of our existence as a nation, adopting the 
rinciples so admirably expressed by Hamilton and sus- 



41 

tained by Washington, Jefferson and all their immediate 
successors, has made the promotion of the industrial arts 
a primary business in legislation and through executive 
action. This policy has borne fruit in the institution of a 
remarkably effective system of patent-law, in the organiza- 
tion of all the essential manufacturing industries and in 
the advancement of agriculture, directly and indirectly ; 
supplying a home market for its products and giving it 
machinery which harvests its grain at ten times the rate 
usual seventy-five years ago, which transports it a thousand 
miles at less cost to the owner than then for a day's jour- 
ney to market, and which opens the most distant lands of 
the trans-Mississippi region to settlement by the sons of the 
original thirteen States. In this work the Franklin Institute 
has taken part, and in no manner more effectively than in 
the inauguration of exhibitions of the products of industry, 
in the assistance in many ways of the managers of the 
great International Exhibition of 1876, and the promotion, 
jointly with the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, of the 
admirable Philadelphia Exposition of 1899. 

The outcome of the policy of Hamilton has been the suc- 
cessful construction of a great system of domestic indus- 
tries which, now that it has reached its period of maturity, 
is not only capable of supplying to our own people the 
cheapest products, the best products and the most abundant, 
but is also at the same time making compensation to its work- 
ing people in the highest wages paid in the world, giving 
them the means of buying more of the comforts and the 
luxuries of modern life than any other people, while extend- 
ing the market for the product of each industry and of 
each producer by making it possible for the members of 
every craft, and for every individual earning wages, to buy 
of every other producer. The fact that it is mainly by the 
payment of high wages to the wage-earner that a market 
can be made for every product at best advantage has never 
before in the history of the world been so well illustrated. 
In this great work of promotion of the whole system of 
American industries, Pennsylvania, and especially Philadel- 
phia, and particularly the Franklin Institute, has had 

4* 



42 

efficient part, and the possibility of that novelty — most 
astounding to the disciples of Cobden and to the practi- 
tioners of the Hamiltonian method as well — has arisen from 
this most successful and well-sustained work of the nine- 
teenth century in our country. An " Export Exposition " 
in the United States, at the end of a century of, on the 
whole, steady and consistent support of the policy of up- 
building and maintenance of home industries, is a lesson 
to the world and one which economists of the ancient sort 
may well study with profit. Free institutions, the patent 
system, the protection of domestic trade and manufactures, 
the consequent growth of the industrial arts, and of manu- 
factures, the resultant provision of a market for the agricul- 
turist, the marvellous stimulation of invention, the growth 
of a people in intelligence, ambition, productivity and pros- 
perity, which have all come of the enlightened policy of 
the founders of the nation, are admirably illustrated at this 
great exposition, the crowning glory of the Franklin Insti- 
tute and of the merchants of Philadelphia, and may well 
astonish the world. 

Thus the " Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsyl- 
vania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts " continues, 
after seventy-five years of good Work, to do its noble duty 
more effectively each year. May the work so well begun in 
our century continue with increasing efficiency for centuries 
still to come ! 



ililiiil 

029 983 977 1 



